Workers have been urged to set their priorities right by ensuring proper planning towards retirement.

Mr. Michael Kofi Bansah, acting Director General of Ghana Prisons Service, gave the advise Thursday at a two-day sensitization workshop for 50 prison officers in Accra on the National Pensions act, 2008, (Act 766) and said every employee would certainly proceed on retirement one day after attaining the mandatory pensionable age of 60.

“This requires strategic planning by employees putting their priorities right,” he stressed, adding “many Ghanaian employees, including Prison officers, least ponder over this reality right from the onset until they are very close to pension.”

In many cases, he said, “pensionable employees are fear stricken and depressed when they are due for retirement with some going to the extent of doctoring the records of their date of birth in order to stay at post a few more years.”

That tendency, he said, stemmed from the fact that “life after pension does not hold any fortune for.” He therefore viewed the workshop as an opportunity to enlighten the officers so that they could take advantage of it and set their priorities right.

Mr. Bansah said successive regimes and governments had made fruitless efforts at finding better and more efficient pension schemes to avert the degrading fate that the new pension scheme was to salvage and demystify problems hitherto created by old pension schemes so as to give hope and dignified life prospects to employees during retirement.

The Interior Ministers, Cletus Avoka, in a speech read on his behalf, said issues of workers’ pay and other emoluments had always been a sore point between government and employees, especially in countries where government was the biggest employer.

The Pension Act, he said, was to improve savings towards sustainable income during retirement. Mr. Avoka said the introduction of a three-tier pension scheme consisting of both mandatory and voluntary schemes was an attempt to reform both the Cap 30 as well as the SSNIT Pension Scheme.

Mr David Adom, Chief Executive of AA&G Services Limited, a consulting firm that is sensitizing the participants on the scheme, said the programme would help the officers to properly manage their lives when the scheme became operational.